BEAVERTON, OR, Aug. 13, 2016 – The HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation and Foundation member AMD will be providing a tutorial on HSA technologies at next month’s 25th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Architectures (PACT). The conference will be held from Sept. 11-15 in Haifa, Israel.

PACT brings together researchers from architecture, compilers, applications and languages to present and discuss innovative research.

The one-day tutorial, presented by AMD Fellow Paul Blinzer will have a morning session on Platform and Hardware requirements; the afternoon session will focus on Software and Toolchains. A snapshot on some of the topics:Platform and Hardware Requirements

Rationale for HSA: GPUs, DSPs and more;

Architecture pillars of HSA

Memory model of HSA

HSAIL, Finalizer, BRIG

Integration of HSA platform features

System architecture research opportunities

Software and Toolchains

HSA software toolchains: LLVM, GCC, HCC, Python

Integrating HSAIL into a new toolchain, experiences and gotcha’s using BRIG, HSAIL, code generation, debugging metadata

Debugging, profiling an HSA-enabled application using these toolchains with CodeXL or gdb

Application frameworks using HSA/ROCR: CAFFE, SPARK, node.js

HSA tool extension for ROCm and CodeXL

Software models, research opportunities

HSA is a standardized platform design supported by more than 40 technology companies and 17 universities that unlocks the performance and power efficiency of the parallel computing engines found in most modern electronic devices. It allows developers to easily and efficiently apply the hardware resources—including CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, FPGAs, fabrics and fixed function accelerators—in today’s complex systems-on-chip (SoCs).

The tutorial and other PACT sessions will be held at the Dan Carmel hotel in Haifa.

For more information, including a full list of speakers, supporting organizations and sponsors please visit: the PACT 2016 conference.

About the HSA Foundation
The HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation is a non-profit consortium of SoC IP vendors, OEMs, Academia, SoC vendors, OSVs and ISVs, whose goal is making programming for parallel computing easy and pervasive. HSA members are building a heterogeneous computing ecosystem, rooted in industry standards, which combines scalar processing on the CPU with parallel processing on the GPU, while enabling high bandwidth access to memory and high application performance with low power consumption. HSA defines interfaces for parallel computation using CPU, GPU and other programmable and fixed function devices, while supporting a diverse set of high-level programming languages, and creating the foundation for next-generation, general-purpose computing.

About Paul Blinzer
Paul Blinzer works on a wide variety of Platform System Software architecture projects and specifically on the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) System Software at Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) as a Fellow in the System Software group. Living in the Seattle, WA area, during his career he has worked in various roles on system level driver development, system software development, graphics architecture, graphics & compute acceleration since the early ’90s. Paul is the chairperson of the “System Architecture Workgroup” of the HSA Foundation. He has a degree in Electrical Engineering (Dipl.-Ing) from TU Braunschweig, Germany.